The Writing Show 2006 Archives

We announce the winners of our first-chapter-of-a-novel contest.

This chapter won first prize in our 2006 first-chapter-of-a-novel contest. "In order to solve his partner's murder, a homophobic rookie cop is forced to team up with a gay-rights activist."

This chapter won second prize in our 2006 first-chapter-of-a-novel contest. "A soldier returns to civilian life as an air traffic controller but snaps and causes a horrible crash. He is institutionalized and copes with debilitating nightmares and migraines by using an experimental drug. The drug opens a realm reserved for the dead where he tries to recover the pieces of his shattered soul."

It's an old joke that if you ask anyone in L.A. how their screenplay is coming along, they'll tell you without batting an eyelash. It's obvious that few of them will ever make it, but in today's Hollywood, even seasoned pros are having a hard time getting projects off the ground. What's going on in the American film industry, and how does it affect your chances of success? Screenwriter Andrew Findlay, who's written for TV and movies all over the world, offers some hard-won insights.

Andrew Findlay has worked in film, TV, and theater in Europe and the U.S. In Europe he consistently earns the highest audience ratings for TV movies like "Delayed Exposure," "Ultimate Trespass," "Twisted Company," and "Oh God! How I'd Love To Get a Good Night's Sleep and Have Sex with the Missus Again." His theatrical screenplays in France and the UK include "Blue Moon," "Riders to the Sea," "Big Bang," "Legacy," "Viva Acapulco," "The Badger," "Angkor," and "Stop Light." He is working on his second four-picture deal for Bertelsmann-owned R.T.L. In the U.S., he developed the comedy "The Minus Touch" with director Peter Chelsom and is working on the series "Selma" with feature producer Janet Yang. He also directs for British television, drawing on his background in photography and the London fringe theater.

After spending years working in Hollywood, Andrew has formed some strong opinions about the place. Hear what he has to say about:

* How screen and television writing differs in the UK, France, Germany, and the U.S.

* What Hollywood is looking for in movie scripts today

* How Hollywood's requirements are affecting screenwriters, producers, and directors

* Why American movie studios are so cautious these days

* Why it's so difficult to advise screenwriters how to succeed today

* Why watching today's films won't help screenwriters gauge the market

* What the film project decision-making process is like

* Why screenwriters need to look upon their work as a job as well as a passion

* How screenplays differ from plays and novels

* Why it's so difficult to get an agent.

Andrew also discusses some of his scripts and the issue of "life rights," reads a short treatment for us, and explains where he gets his ideas.

What makes a biography special? Is it enough that the subject has lived an interesting or famous life? This week we visit with Bob Andelman, author of Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, who tackles these questions and more. It's a long interview, but Bob was so fascinating that I insisted he keep talking. I would have kept him longer, but I started to feel guilty. Please join us and see why I couldn't stop.

Bob Andelman is the author or co-author of several best-selling biographical, business, management and sports books, including, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, The Profit Zone, Built From Scratch, Mean Business, and five others. He has also written hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories for a vast array of publications ranging from Redbook and the St. Petersburg Times to Gallery.

Join us for this riveting interview in which Bob discusses:

* How he came to write the book

* How he went about interviewing Will Eisner and the people who knew him

* How he organized his research

* How he dealt with difficult interviewees

* How he decided what to put in the book and what to leave out

* Whether he worried about being sued

* What makes a great biography

* What you should never, ever do when writing a biography

* How he feels about including his own opinion

* How he's marketing the book

* What it was like to work with the great Will Eisner.

Here's a question for you: is a book a thing or a place? If you said a thing, get ready for a big change. The networked book is here: the new agora/plaza/forum where author, publisher, and readers congregate to ponder, discuss, joke, enjoy, and refer. The book is now searchable, linkable, multimedia-able, commentable, annotatable, previewable, mutable, divisible, aggregatable, correlatable, syndicatable, feedable, emailable, Flickrable, deli.cio.us-able, Diggable. In fact, the book is on the brink of such a huge transformation that we wouldn't be surprised if it opened its own chain of coffee bars.

Curious as we could be, The Writing Show caught up with two fellows of the Institute for the Future of the Book, Ben Vershbow and Jesse Wilbur, to find out how they are experimenting with this fascinating idea.

In this fascinating look at the future, Ben and Jesse explain:

* What a networked book is and why anyone would want to make one

* What a networked book looks like

* How networked books will change authors' roles

* What new skills will be required of authors wishing to host networked books

* What networked books will mean for readers

* How to get readers to show up at networked books

* How networked books could change publishing

* How networked books might change the world as a whole

* How networked books might make revenue,or not

* What networked books might mean for librarians and information pros

* How instructors might use networked books in the classroom.

If you write or publish, you must hear this interview, for the times, they are a-changin.'

E-books have been slow to catch on for one simple reason: they've been hard to read. But now the e-book landscape seems poised to change. Are e-books a good investment for authors and publishers? Hear what an e-book publisher has to say.

Preston DuBose is president of the roleplaying game publisher 12 to Midnight. Preston and his four colleagues started the company in 2003 with no background in publishing or e-books and grew it to one of the top 25 game publishers at the e-book retailer RPGNow. The company specializes in modern horror, with Preston having contributed two such adventures and co-written a third.

In this fascinating interview, Preston explains:

* What e-books can do for authors and publishers

* What you can do with e-books that you can't do with printed books

* What costs are associated with publishing e-books

* Who distributes e-books

* Why marketing e-books is so challenging, and so critical

* How digital rights management affects e-books and their readers

* How e-book publishing is enabling readers to buy pieces of books

* What you can expect of e-book reading devices (they will knock your socks off)

* How e-books affect writers' contracts

* How e-books might change the world.

If you're self-published, traditionally published, or unpublished, this info-packed interview is a must-hear for you!

From Forever My Lady:

"You got cotton for brains or something? Move!" the Drill Instructor screamed.

He was nose-to-nose with Dio and Dio could smell the funk from the D.I.'s breath, like cigarettes and garlic. He was a stout black man that resembled a boar more than anything. His eyes were piercing enough to bring an elephant to his knees. His teeth had nasty coffee stains like he brushed his teeth with shit or something and never flossed. Spit sprayed out of his mouth with every syllable he spoke. Dio had a pounding headache from all the yelling and the D.I. had been doing it for the last 24 hours, ever since they got off the prison bus.

Dio hadn't had a cigarette in over a week and he was about to jump out of his skin. He'd been smoking since he was 12. He was exhausted, hungry, and just not in the mood for all the bullshit. His mind was on something much more important than all this exercise crap that the D.I. had all the inmates, or trainees as they called them, doing. He was troubled, aching inside, like his heart had been ripped out and stomped on over and over.

Jeff Rivera writes and publishes "urban novels," and if his first is any indication, he's going to be hot stuff. In fact, he already is.

Jeff has written two books. His first, Oh Yes I Can!, was an inspirational book for young people. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and raised in Hillsboro, Oregon. He has been writing since he was six years old and has made it his personal mission to change the way the world thinks in a positive way. Forever My Lady is his first novel.

In 1997, a miracle happened to author Jeff Rivera that would turn his life around 180 degrees. After living in his car for months with his family, he managed to get on his feet and begin working at a department store. That is when he met a young man that would change his life forever. The young man shared with Jeff slices of his life as a gang member on the streets of LA. He began to tell Jeff a story of love, and of loss, of passion and of heartbreak. He told him of how the love of one girl, he called his "lady," had inspired him to become a new man. Listening as he shared the private letters and poems he had written to her, the story captured Jeff's heart and soul and never let it go. It motivated Jeff to write a story that would inspire others, as this young man's story had, that anything is possible with the power of love.

In this high-adrenaline, inspiring interview, Jeff reveals:

* How he started the book, and how he fleshed it out

* Why he decided to tell much of his story through letters between the characters

* How he got stuck while writing some of his characters, and what he did to overcome the block

* How he keeps the reader riveted to the story

* What he doesn't like about most novels, and what he did differently

* How he comes up with gripping and natural dialog

* How he came up with his characters' names

* Where the title came from

* Why he started his own publishing company, and where he plans to take it

* How his book was picked up by a major publisher

* Why he's writing a sequel.

Join us for this very special conversation with a star in the making.

From Crazy Quilt:

"I used to wonder if God was really up there the way the preacher said he was. But I couldn't grasp the concept of a God-king in the sky then any more than I can now. Back then I thought that I was the only one who knew God was really the stars. God the Universe.

"There ain't nothing like it," Mac says, drawing on his cigarette, his eyes still on the sky.

"No," I say. "Nothing."

"I met a old Indian in Oklahoma that told me all them stars is the spirits of dead ancestors. You reckon that's true?"

"Captain Kirk wouldn't think so."

"You think Star Trek is true?"

"No," I say, my earlier wariness stirring. I am wondering if he's crazy. Crazy enough to think Star Trek is real. Crazy enough to kill me.

He laughs. "Well, I'll tell you something. They're both true. That old Indian and Star Trek. Both of 'em. There's enough stars up there to accommodate more than one way of looking at 'em."

"That makes sense," I say.

"You think it does?"

"More sense than anything I've heard in a long time," I say and mean it.

"Then you're a damned smart woman," he says. He points to something high on the horizon, a streak of light. "Look," he says," one of 'em's falling."

Continuing our fiction binge (who can ever get enough?), we talk novel writing with Paula Paul, author of 23 novels spanning a variety of genres: mystery, the historical novel, children's stories, and "the novel."

Author Paula Griffith Paul is an award-winning novelist who usually writes mysteries, but her current novel, Crazy Quilt, is a literary novel. The main character is a woman whose body, marriage, and spirit have been ravaged by cancer treatment, but who fights her way back in a most unconventional way. Paula is donating one third of the royalities to cancer research.

Paula was born on her grandparents' cotton farm near Shallowater, Texas, and graduated from a country high school near Maple, Texas. She earned a B.A. in journalism and has worked as a reporter for newspapers in both Texas and New Mexico. She's been the recipient of state and national awards for her work as a journalist.

In this fascinating interview, Paula explains:

* What is common to all the books she's written, despite their being in different genres

* Why she sometimes writes under a pseudonym

* How she approaches characterization and plot

* Why and how the reader is so important to her

* How she analyzes other authors' books and draws inspiration from them

* What she does to hold the reader's attention

* What her writing process looks like

* How landscape and setting mold personality

* How she deals with beginnings and endings

* What the hardest part of writing is for her.

Don't miss this exciting show featuring two Paulas, Paula Paul and Writing Show host Paula B., as they explore the fertile world of novel writing!

From Everything She Thought She Wanted:

"I had to be good at managing. It was my job. But, over the years, I had grown wary of using that word. Men, I noticed, were a little tricky on the subject of women and jobs. Being good at my "job," though, bought me a little time and space, which I needed. If Ryder was busy with his book, and the children with their sandcastles, I was free to think, like the Japanese who, it was said, had so little space in their crowded country that their only source of true privacy was inside their heads.

That morning I felt restless. A couple of days ago there had been a storm and the sea was still angry. I checked the three children, who were busy with their sandcastles, buttoned my cardigan over my swimming costume and announced, "I'm going for a stroll. Can you watch the children?"

Ryder barely looked up from his book. "Don't be too long."

I placed a finger against his cheek. "What if I never come back?"

"Don't say that. Even as a joke." "

What a joy it is to talk about novel writing with experienced authors who have learned by doing! You will love our free-ranging discussion with the delightful Elizabeth Buchan, who explains how she approaches everything from character to setting to coming up with just the right title.

Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer for Penguin Books, a position that was excellent training for a fledgling writer as it necessitated reading widely through the Penguin list. She later became a fiction editor at Random House but decided after a couple of years that she should do what she wished to do: write.

For her first two novels, she took as her subject very typical watersheds: the French Revolution (Daughters of the Storm) and the Second World War (Light of the Moon). The latter followed the fortunes of a woman Special Operations Executive agent in occupied France.

Her third novel, Consider the Lily, is the story of a 1930s woman who comes to terms with her unhappiness through gardening. Perfect Love took as its theme Mark Twain's dictum, "No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married for a quarter of a century" and explored the bargains and accommodations that have to be made in any relationship. Against Her Nature reworked Thackeray's Vanity Fair set against a backdrop of the Lloyds of London insurance disasters during the 80s.

These titles were followed by Secrets of the Heart and Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman, which was made into a television film for CBS. Her later novels are The Good Wife Strikes Back, Everything She Thought She Wanted, and the sequel to Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman , Wives Behaving Badly.

Elizabeth reviews for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Join Elizabeth as she and host Paula B. explore the craft of novel writing, including:

* Where she gets her ideas

* How she grabs the reader's attention from the very first word

* How she uses imagery to illuminate her characters and their conflicts

* How she taps into her subconscious to solve writing problems

* How she deals with endings

* How she makes sure she "shows" rather than "tells"

* How she makes her minor characters memorable

* When to eliminate minor characters

* How she comes up with names for her characters, and why she works so hard to find the right name

* How she feels about the use of adjectives

* How she keeps herself from being overwhelmed by her research

* Why she always writes three drafts of her books

* How her preparation and writing process has evolved

* What part of writing she finds the most difficult.